“The Current State of BuddyPress”: BP-Tricks Article?

So as a relative newbie to the wordpress/buddypress community I subscribe to a number of sites for news, tips, etc. One of those sites, Bowe’s bp-tricks.com, appears to be undergoing a bit of maintenance. As of the writing of this post, the splash page displays an image of a re-designed interface and what appears to be an article entitled “The Current State of BuddyPress: A Critical Analysis”.

Now, I’m a ‘noob’ and am not at all qualified to debate the health or potential future of BuddyPress. I wonder if @boonebgorges@djpaul@r-a-y@hnla or some of the other pros have anything thoughts? It’ll be interesting to see the actual article once he finishes his work on the site.

In an older post on his website – thanks to Google cache – Bowe said – “And I’m also working on a something extremely secret called Infinity, which should make all you BuddyPress lovers really happy!” Ooo wee!

Whereas I can well imagine what prompts such an article, I’m not sure it’s apposite, The snippet ” I can only be honest and say not much has changed for almost a year” is a little unfair and a surprising comment to make really, a fair bit has changed over the last year and lets not forget A/ how complicated this kind of app is and B/ that there are only three core commiters to the svn trunk.

Of course I don’t want to judge Bowe’s post given I can only read a small section of it, I will however tend to agree that there has been a slow up in plugin development and perhaps the plugins authors have exhausted their honeymoon period with BP and are not able to devote so much time to it.

For the record I will point out once more just how much work is involved in coding and testing/debugging plugins and constructing themes- for those that are not aware – it’s a huge amount of time and we must not forget that this is an open source project despite WP’s involvement and all the work that is done is given freely all the long hours are given with little expectation of any return apart from the gratitude of the community – yes it’s true that some coders do manage to monetize their work too an extent but they are a small fraction of those that have contributed their work -. The pace of the project is governed strictly by the time that people are prepared or are able to put in, allied to that fact we have a situation where we have simply three core coders doing 90% of the work, these three all have paid jobs and are not able to commit to full time ( it’s surprising how much time is given though! ) on the project, understandably.

What I would wag my finger at and offer a generalised admonishment to is the wider community for it’s lack of direct involvement at any level. An open source project is carried by it’s community they drive it along and sadly I see very little participation from them, there are those that are pretty active in using BP have experience and knowledge yet are seldom seen on this site. There are many levels at which people can help, checking patches out and reporting back ( if one has a localhost dev environment ) reporting bugs to the trac system, adding to the codex which could really do with some tlc, many ways of contributing and at various skill levels we do not all have to be of the caliber of Boone, Paul or JJJ to help out and push things forward. ( oh and I consider myself one of those that could be helping more fwiw, time and pressure of earning a scant living though )

I have always been one who was vocal – at least early last year – when changes did need to be effected and things seemed to be in slight turmoil or turpitude, some of those changes came to be some didn’t , there are still many things that could be improved with this project and hopefully they might happen with time as for pushing for those things a lot has been said publicly and privately and there is little point going over old ground.

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